In North American sports, teams that are successful find themselves in the playoffs while teams that do poorly find themselves with a high draft pick. With college athletics as the main feeder for professional leagues, draft picks are a massive commodity. Although there have been a number of great players that have come from late draft picks or were even undrafted, having an early draft pick greatly increases a team's chances of getting an eventual-franchise player.
I make the argument that the way North American sports leagues are formatted, it encourages loses. If a team is not in a battle for a playoff position, they have no incentive to perform at a high level down the stretch. The only motivation for a bad team to try to knock off a good team is for bragging rights or for the players' personal enjoyment.
Some franchises have even embraced the "tank", which means that a team who is already out of contention purposely loses games in order to earn a higher draft pick. Tanking is bad for leagues and fans because it eliminates the competitive nature of the games. It is most common in the NFL and NBA, where high draft picks have the greatest value.
Some executives have urged their team to tank once the season was already out of reach. This can create internal conflict within the organization, as most players are competitive and want to win. League executives have condemned tanking for the same reasons already listed above — that it eliminates the validity of competition in the league. The difficulty surrounding tanking is that it can be difficult to figure out when a team is doing it. Sometimes teams are just genuinely bad.
In the 2017-2018 NBA season, Maverick's owner Mark Cuban was fined $600K for comments about tanking. Toward the end of the season, at a dinner with players, Cuban said "look, losing is our best option."
However, even if a team is genuinely bad, the draft system still rewards that. It's a flawed system. Although players, coaches and executives make money, the primary goal of professional sports leagues is to provide entertainment for fans. This creates conflict when a team is bad and wants to lose, but fans still want to win.
Even when tanking may not be occurring, if a team with a bad record pulls out a win, some fans will actually be disappointed that the team won, because it moves the team down in the draft order. Thus, the culture confuses fans between cheering for their team to win like a traditional sports fan or cheering for their team to lose so they can have a better draft pick and hopefully draft a game-changing player in the future. With that said, having a high draft pick does not necessarily mean the team will get a good player. That's another flaw in the tanking logic.
It turns out that tanking was beneficial for the Mavericks. They selected Luka Doncic with the 3rd pick in the 2018 draft, and he is now an early frontrunner for Rookie of the Year. The Mavericks are 12-11 so far this season without Dirk Nowitzki playing a single minute.
The bottom line is that the North American sports leagues are structured in a way that rewards failure. Of course, a winning a championship or a deep playoff run are beneficial and worth it for teams, as they earn television revenue and exposure the deeper they go into the playoffs. But it is literally better to finish with the worst record than it is to finish just outside of the playoff positions. Finishing with the worst record gets a team the number one draft pick in the next draft while finishing just outside of the playoffs gets the team a middle-of-the-pack draft pick and the disappointment of just missing out on the playoffs. It's a flawed system.
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